Sweetheart Deal (2022 | USA | 98 minutes | Elisa Levine, Gabriel Miller)
I have long wondered when a movie like Sweetheart Deal would be made. The online discussions of sex work often purposefully, or conveiniently, ignores the stories about women (usually) whose only option is sex work on dangerous streets like Seattle’s Aurora Avenue where drugs, sexual assault, and exploitation are very real dangers that come with the territory. It’s a line of work that’s a last resort in an extremely punitive, cruel system.
Sweetheart Deal follows four sex workers on Aurora Avenue. Their names are Sara, Amy, Kristine, and Tammy. It’s one of the most bleak films I’ve ever seen. It is also quite necessary. This is a movie full of empathy for women whose lives seem to be about desperation and desire to make the least bad choices for themselves and their families. When one woman profiled said that her disapproving family still expected her to provide household necessities and staples, she tells the camera that she makes sure she’ll go down on an additional stranger to ensure she has money for milk for her family, I lost all composure and broke down bawling. It was the first of about six times in this documentary that made me cry.
The filmmakers also follow an area man named Laughn Elliott Doescher who calls himself the “mayor of Aurora Avenue” because he provided sex workers a place to feel safe and detox in his camper. It turned out that he was raping women while they and recording them without their consent. Authorities found countless videos on his phone, including with women who told Doescher they loved him because of the safe place he provided to them but had no idea what he was doing when they were unconscious. He was sentenced to ten years in prison after he was convicted in 2016.
Sweetheart Deal is 98 minutes of tragedy and heartbreak but it also felt so vital and important to tell the stories of these women who suffer from so much abuse and marginalization. “Sex work is work” and “my body, my choice” are good, rhetorical, platitudes (that I believe) but they are also too vague to meaningfully represent anyone whose choice and autonomy are often taken out of the equation, often by situations far beyond their control.
It’s an uncomfortable watch, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an important one. It’s an exercise in empathy and finding the humanity in everyone we encounter. I hope a lot of people watch this movie.
Sweetheart Deal makes its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival with screenings on Monday, April 18 at 6:30 PM at Pacific Place and on Wednesday, April 20 at 3:00 PM at SIFF Cinema Uptown.
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